After an exhausting, fascinating, depressing, humourous, difficult 100 days (approx) at the Richmond bird cleaning station, we had finished moving the remaining birds to Tubbs Island (between Novato and Sonoma off of Hwy 37). Ecology Action had secured portions of an abandoned warehouse – owned by the East Bay Humane Society – as the new home for the recently incorporated International Bird Rescue Research Center. Left at the Richmond facility were dozens of bird enclosures, fresh water pools, tons of pine shavings, and more accouterments than one can imagine. In the spirit of our volunteerism, we disassembled, recycled, composted, trashed and hauled until nothing more remained – except bird shit and some pine shavings cemented to the floor with bird shit.
We opened the huge loading dock doors and attacked the messy floor with water sprayed from a garden hose, trying to flush everything out to a storm drain in the parking lot. After a time, we realized that this method would require more hours than we were happy to invest. We weighed our options. I focused on the fire hose hanging on the wall. The other volunteers, Lila Bauer chief among them, tried to dissuade me with, “That’s only for fires,” “We’re not allowed to use it,” and “We could get in trouble.”
My response was “So they’re going to throw us in jail? How would they know?”
So i opened the hose cabinet and we dragged the hose nozzle end to the far interior of the massive room. I enlisted two others to help me control the hose and another turned the valve on.
Alarm bell.
“Keep turning, we need more pressure.”
Cleaning commenced in earnest, blasting the concrete floor free of cemented bird shit and pine shavings while the alarm bell continued.
The pressure eased off and the water stopped as the valve was closed.
“Hey! Keep it going,” i shouted
Lila called over to me, “Fire trucks are coming.”
Sure enough. Their sirens were becoming louder by the second.
I put down the hose and went to the loading dock where two humongous fire trucks pulled up. As the firefighters bailed out of their trucks, i shouted, “There isn’t a fire. There’s no fire.”
The oldest of the crew with the biggest badge approached and came up onto the loading dock with me. I explained that we were using the hose to clean the “mess” off the floor and didn’t know that using the hose would sound an alarm and bring “you guys.”
He looked around. He gazed directly at me. He began to laugh. He almost doubled over with laughter. Finally, he finished laughing and told us that all during the previous months, they were concerned that with all the pine shavings we had, a serious fire was a real threat. When the alarm sounded at the fire station, he thought the worst had come to pass. He was relieved it was a false alarm.
Not one to let an opportunity pass, i asked, “Could we just use the hose another 5 minutes? Then we’ll be finished.”
“You do and i’ll arrest you.”